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Yaakov Menken, CEO of Capalon Internet Solutions of Baltimore, spent the last month of summer setting up an open source-based call center, called Contact Loved Ones, for families separated by hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

Currently, over 100,000 registered open source projects are on SourceForge.net, and you've never heard of most of them. While the great majority of projects remain in obscurity, some have turned into successful businesses and made the transition to mainstream. Maria Winslow looks at some of the features of this new breed of business.

Among all the reference books to grace a stores shelf some of the trickiest to write are "beginner's guides". While it's easy to include the information necessary to start using something, making it stick in the readers memory is not. Peter van der Linden's Guide to Linux is a book that mostly sticks, due to it's friendly tone and well chosen examples.

I set out to find out just how popular open-source software has become within big business. These are companies that have the money to spend on the biggest, most complex packages that IBM, Oracle, and other enterprise software makers have to offer.

The future of Linux on smartphones and "mobile terminals" in general seems bright if smartphones sales continue to grow more than 100% a year and if the growth of Linux as an OS on those phones continues to grow as it does now.

Tiny ERP is taking a small and midsized business-friendly approach to enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. Even though the company only has 12 implementations under its belt, its ERP suite -- also named Tiny ERP -- is a mature entity

As the dust settles from aKademy 2005, the annual KDE conference, it's a good time to take a look at what the KDE developers are working on. Though KDE 3.5 isn't even out yet, developers are already working on KDE 4. Plenty of work has already gone into porting existing code to Qt4, the GUI toolkit upon which KDE is based, and KDE developers are working on projects that could radically change how the world's most popular free desktop looks and works.

BEIJING (Reuters) - China set new regulations on Internet news content on Sunday, widening a campaign of controls it has imposed on other Web sites, such as discussion groups. "The state bans the spreading of any news with content that is against national security and public interest," the official Xinhua news agency said in announcing the new rules, which took effect immediately.

There is a common understanding among Internet users that e-mail is one of the most trusted technologies around. Want to quit your job? E-mail your boss! Declare your flame to your boyfriend? Fire up Pine! Get information on applications for the fall semester at NYU? Hover to Mail.app! After all, it all seems so easy: type a few words, enter a generally easy to understand address and your missive is on its merry way, bouncing from MX record to MX record until it arrives in the hand of its giddy recipient. This however fails to take into account one of this century's most painful truths: e-mail, after so many years of being relied on, still doesn't work reliably — and I'm not talking about SPAM here but rather about the very structure of the network.

Africa Source II, a week-long workshop that will bring together free software developers from across the continent, is to be held in January next year. The workshop will be held in Kalangala, Uganda, from January 8 to 15 next year.

We last left our hero (you) thinking to him/herself that "Alrightey, I'm ready to give this Linux thing a whirl. I have a few hours of extra time, a shiny-new or weathered-dull computer to try it out with, a couple beers left over from part 1, and I'm needing a book to guide me through whatever the heck this stuff is all about."

Sita, the South African government's technology procurement agency, last week issued a request for bid calling for potential suppliers of open source solutions to government. The bid request is for the "procurement of an open source distribution(operating system and applications) and related software support services fro personal computers for a period of three years."

Sun Microsystems is hoping to steal market share from Microsoft Corp. with the release on Tuesday of a new version of its business software collection, StarOffice, with improved compatibility with Microsoft Office.